Good morning America, this is your wakeup call
Fewer Say Bush Is Serving Middle Class
Poll Shows Americans Split Over Whether President Has Governed Compassionately
By Dana Milbank and Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page A06
As he approaches the November election, President Bush has shed a good part of the "compassionate conservative" image he cultivated during the 2000 election, a Washington Post poll has found.
Bush came to office three years ago with a message that he was different from traditional Republican conservatives because he was promoting programs for the poor and disadvantaged. But with his presidency dominated by foreign policy issues and such traditional conservative favorites as tax cuts, he has dropped from his speeches the compassionate conservative moniker that was his trademark in 2000.
The Post poll found Americans split over whether Bush has governed in a compassionate way, with 49 percent saying he has and 45 percent saying he has not. That is down sharply from February 2003, when a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 64 percent of Americans thought he had governed compassionately.
While a majority of Americans (58 percent) say Bush has governed as expected [P6: because Republican insiders didn't expect him to be compassionate in the first place], the Post poll showed that the rest are about twice as likely to say the president has been less compassionate (25 percent) than to say he has been more compassionate (13 percent). Forty-four percent now believe Bush cares most about serving upper-income people, an increase from 31 percent in September 1999 and 39 percent in July 2000. Forty-one percent believe Bush cares equally about all people[P6: Logically, a different statement than saying he cares about people.], with small numbers saying he favors the poor or the middle class. [P6: I'll bet those "small numbers" of people are rich as Croesus and angry they pay any taxes at all.]
Whether this loss of compassion credentials is a problem for Bush depends on which voters prove to be the decisive bloc in November. Political strategists say the Bush campaign is gambling that it can win largely by mobilizing core GOP voters in large numbers -- a departure from recent elections, in which many moderate "swing" voters were the key.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff has determined that both Democratic- and GOP-leaning voters have made up their minds early this year. With fewer voters crossing between parties in recent elections, "there's not much flexibility on either side," he said. "Bush folks have been preparing for this type of election for a long time. There's a handful of groups up for grabs."
